Part of our Q3 series on change management in tax.
Ask any tax leader what has changed about the job and you will hear a version of the same answer. The work is more complex, the compliance demands keep climbing, and the team is not getting any bigger. Ruben van Aarle of Keeyns sums it up in three lines: “There is an increase of complexity, there is an increase of compliancy and there is a decrease of capacity.”
That gap between what is demanded and what a team can deliver is the defining pressure of modern tax. You feel it whether you run five entities or fifty. For our Q3 series on change management, we spoke with Dominik Wellmann, who leads the tax department at Mercedes-Benz in Germany, about how he faced a severe version of that gap and rebuilt his function around it. His story is not finished, and he is the first to say so. “It's still ongoing. None of them is really done yet.”
A hard stretch for the automotive industry led Mercedes-Benz to offer voluntary severance across the business. In tax, a significant part of the German team took it, and there was no budget to replace them. The same compliance obligations, the same deadlines, far fewer hands.
Most tax leaders will never face a cut that steep. But the underlying math is familiar to everyone running a lean team. You cannot simply hire your way out, and for many companies you cannot keep buying your way out through advisors either. At some point the only lever left is how well you run what you already have.
Dominik's first move was not a new org chart. It was candor. He calls it “brutal transparency.”
“Not sugarcoating things, not making it a bit softer than it actually is,” he explains. He told his people plainly what was coming and what it would mean for their workloads. He was equally direct about the scale of the transformation the whole industry is facing, the kind of shift where standing still is the real risk.
That honesty was uncomfortable, and that was the point. It is also what earned him a committed team on the other side. “On a very early stage, we had their buy-in and commitment, especially of those people who stayed.”
What could have been pure loss became a rare chance to redesign. Dominik was offered the package himself and chose to stay for one reason.
“This is now the time to create something new and to transform a tax department in a way I might never ever do it again, because I have the full freedom to redesign my department.”
He passed that freedom down. With fewer resources, every task had to justify itself. “A lot of things were just done because we have always done them in a certain way.” he says. “This is now the time to radical rethink whether we are really doing the right stuff with the right resources and in the right way.”
This is the part that translates directly to any tax team feeling stretched. Before you automate anything or brief another advisor, you need a clear view of what your processes actually are, which ones create value, and where the time really goes. You cannot get control of work you cannot see.
Dominik kept the effort collective. “We are in this together and we have to work on it together.” Resistance never fully went away, and still returns with every difficult update. His response is presence rather than relentless positivity: regular conversation, and room to be frustrated out loud. As a leader, he says, it matters “to also give them the room to be frustrated.” The payoff is simple. They “feel heard.”
We asked Dominik what his ideal tax team of the future would look like. His first response was a reality check. He cannot start from scratch. What he has is a “brown field,” an existing team and structure he has a responsibility to bring along, not a blank page to design freely.
But as a thought experiment, his ideal is clear. He imagines a single human expert leading each tax area, supported by a full range of AI agents handling the routine load: answering easy questions, drafting documentation, preparing declarations, with the expert accountable for the outcome.
The human stays in the lead for good reason. Tax authorities are not ready to accept work produced entirely by machine, and the liability rests with the professional. There is also a talent squeeze coming. “Not so many people are studying tax anymore,” Dominik notes, “so I think in five or 10 years this will even get worse.”
Even as a hypothetical, it reshapes how he thinks about the role. The future tax professional needs judgment over rote knowledge and the confidence to challenge a tool, along with the humility to defer to it when it is right, “acknowledging at some point that AI is smarter than they are.” It also demands a different relationship with the business. “You're just invited to the party from your business partners if they really value what you're doing.”
And it points to something every tax leader should sit with. More automation does not reduce the need for oversight. It increases it. The more work runs through agents and tools, the more a tax leader needs one reliable place to see every process, prove it was done, and stand behind it.
The pressure only sharpens as tax authorities modernize. In several markets they now move faster than the companies they regulate, demanding information on timelines that stretch even well-run teams. When compliance accelerates and capacity does not, the answer cannot be more firefighting. It has to be control: one source of truth, every process visible, every obligation trackable, nothing depending on the one person who happens to remember how it works.
Whatever the ideal team looks like, the real work is the shift toward control, and it faces every CFO and Head of Tax watching their own version unfold. You cannot always add people. You can get a grip on your processes. As Dominik and Ruben agreed, this is not a project with a finish line. It is “change management work for the next couple of decades.”
The teams that come through it will be the ones that stopped reacting and started controlling.
This interview is part of our Q3 series on change management in tax. Explore the full series, including our change management crash course, to see how leading teams are getting back in control.